The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup

About The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup

The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup runs year-round from coast to coast to coast. When you lead or join a cleanup you are helping to protect the habitat of aquatic and shoreline species by keeping litter and garbage out of their habitat.

Litter is bad for wildlife. Animals, big and very small, can mistake litter for food, consuming harmful pollutants or filling their system with non-digestible junk. They can drown by becoming entangled in rope, string or nets, get trapped by plastic waste and become disfigured or die. Plastic litter can break apart into bite-size pieces and degrade even further into smaller pieces that are difficult to pick up, but are dangerous to wildlife. We can also point the finger at litter for transporting invasive species, or introducing harmful toxins into an ecosystem.

What You Can Do

Your campus is in a watershed and connects to freshwater ecosystems. Keeping litter out of these ecosystems will help safeguard our freshwater.

You can reduce, reuse and recycle to play your part in limiting the amount of garbage you generate through personal lifestyle choices.

Litter in our aquatic ecosystems comes from many sources. And as much as you may do your part to reduce, reuse and recycle, litter and garbage will continue to wash through our ecosystems for years to come, degrading habitat and harming wildlife.

This means we need to take action together to minimize the impact that litter has on the environment, removing it before it can degrade our ecosystems and hurt fish, turtles, amphibians, birds, and more.

You can lead your own cleanup or see below if your school is already involved and join!

The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, presented by Loblaw Limited Companies, is a joint conservation initiative of WWF-Canada and Vancouver Aquarium.